Let’s begin with a pessimistic idea. People are stupid [insert ignorant, arrogant, whatever] and academics are people. And a hundred years of ethnographic evidence shows that researchers, anthropologist and otherwise, can get things wrong. Being stupid in this sense isn’t so bad. School is supposed to help with this problem. Dedication to a life of intellectual debate is supposed to make us better thinkers. It is supposed to instill critical thinking. It should make us less stupid. At least that’s what you’d hope.

The truth is, and I’ll speak for myself here to avoid stirring too much fire, that I am still stupid after writing a thesis.

So here is the question, what is an academic to do when he or she finds themselves wearing a stupid hat, after spending years in school? Say I became a teacher, how is a teacher, whose primary job it is to quantify their students stupidity, supposed to walk into a classroom while wearing the very same stupid hat? Surely the students would complain, and their parents would rage.

Teachers depend on maintaining intellectual authority superiority .

“Of course I get things wrong” they will think, but never will they let the layman make that assertion. That is why academics have a sophisticated system of peer review. The work published get’s reviewed by other expert academics, who maintain the same necessary air of intellectual authority.

This is why the majority of anthropologists are not sharing their work outside of a peer reviewed journal, and why they don’t want to share their work openly online. You don’t want to engage with noobs. If a noob contributes to what you are doing, you might end up getting flagged as noob yourself. One anthropologist referred to the Youtube audience as a bunch of fifteen year old brats. If only that were the case. Youtube brats are far worse than a bunch of fifteen year olds. Or at least they can be. [mental note check up on Michael Wesch’s youtube projects, which seem to get pretty supportive comments actually, which are then integrated into academic projects… ].

This is the challenge of learning in the “open”. By sharing work online as work progresses one is more likely to be attacked/shown to be stupid [arrogant, ignorant, prejudiced, etc]. This is a wonderful thing in terms of making progress in an academic discipline. Critique should be welcomed. As far as a discipline goes, finding out researchers are wrong, and learning from that, is a wonderful thing.

But most academics cut this discussion off. The style in which they write rarely invites genuine questioning. To ask a question would be to invite the participation of the students and people around them, and again, the academic doesn’t want anyone else to answer their questions! At best, they will read their paper at an expert conference and invite 10 minutes of discussion at the end. Wow talkabout opening up ones research!

So why don’t most anthropologists blog and share their work outside peer reviewed presses? It doesn’t help them look smarter than everyone else! To look smarter then everyone else they restrict their work, make it difficult to find, they write in ways that invite no questions, they write in ways no one wants to bother to understand, they write about things not important to anyone else, etc… [Ie, as happened to most ethnography in the past. Go in, write about stick to talking about century old social theory, as a way of avoiding any issues of war, imperialism, etc… certainly don’t involve others in creating the question in the first place.]

Go ahead, call me stupid. That’s what this blog is for.

[so is it fair to say publishing Open Access is an attempt by researchers to open their work to commentary? Probably not. After all, even if the article is OA, there might not be any attempt to disseminate it. Just having a page like this one on the internet, is not a very active way of obtaining feedback is it? Feedback is really ignored in the OA discussions… Most of the arguments for OA are based on other professional arguments, such as “OA get’s you cited more”. hmmm]

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6 responses to this post.

I love this. I think you’re right. Obviously to a point, because time constrains and probably other factors do hinder employed anthros from blogging on a daily or even weekly basis. That said a lot of hard working anthros in the academy still manage to teach three courses, sit on editorial boards, present papers, do all their admin work, publish books, peer review, plus many other duties and still blog. I havent managed that balance with any kind of consistency. Altho i do rarely.

My personal position for failing to blog more is a mixture of the time constrains, which impact on the quality of what i might blog (and hence not wanting to look stooopid), but also wanting to have a social life outside of work. Its a toss up; do nothing but anthro and get my blogging or public pieces out there, or find quality time to do other things outside anthro which remind me i’m human and not a reading/thinking machine.

Thanks for the comments! I’m bringing this rant into my thesis conclusion, hopefully in a less caustic fashion.

The part about academics not being ready for feedback outside the peer review process, ties in to an article I found today discussing how blogs and twitter are being used to rip into peer reviewed articles days after they are published, and how authors aren’t always ready to deal with this.

thanks for posting this [rant] owen. i have a lot of the same thoughts and sentiments, and often wonder where things are heading.

“This is why the majority of anthropologists are not sharing their work outside of a peer reviewed journal, and why they don’t want to share their work openly online. You don’t want to engage with noobs.”

ya, i do think that’s part of it. it’s funny to me that so many talk about public engagement, and then most of the work that’s published ends up in publications that are DEFINITELY not geared toward wider audiences. take a look at American Anthropologist, Human Organization, Practicing Anthropology, and even Anthro News. None of these are meant to engage with folks outside of academia (how would people even FIND them?).

still, i do think some changes are on the horizon. and i look to certain anthros who are moving in a direction that pays a lot more attention to writing, style, presentation, etc. communication matters–so it really makes sense to start paying more attention to writing (and general media production) as a fundamental method (or craft) in anthropology. pure opinion though.

I especially like the idea that the hierarchical conceptions pervasive in academia are a problem, not least for the quality of the research produced.

I guess that if one can’t deal with noobs’ criticism, then maybe one have no business teaching (I tend to think that publishing research is not, or should not be conceived as very different from teaching.)

I guess some people might argue though that for mathematicians, the fact that they “they write in ways no one wants to bother to understand, they write about things not important to anyone else” is an absolutely normal and good state of affairs, and then the same people might ask why it should be different for anthropologists ?

Maybe the fact that anthropologists are supposed to study “human beings”, while mathematicians are supposed to study “quantity, structure, space, and change”, and that you can’t do harm to the latter abstract entities, have something to do with it.